Archeologists Seek Clues To Verify Queen Of Sheba

March 28, 1986|By Colin Campbell, The New York Times

The Queen of Sheba is described in the first book of Kings, Chapter 10, as having visited King Solomon in Jerusalem ``with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.`` She tested the wise king with ``hard questions,`` evidently got the right answers, and then departed as mysteriously as she had arrived.

But did she really exist? The question has been argued for years. Many scholars and archeologists have assumed that the Biblical land of Sheba was in southwestern Arabia, where the ancient Greeks placed the Sabaeans and where some noble ruins testify to the inhabitants` former glory. So perhaps, since her country existed, the biblical Queen of Sheba existed.

One flaw in this hypothesis has been that Solomon ruled Israel in the 10th century B.C., three centuries earlier than the oldest known remains of Sheba`s highest civilization.

But now an archeologist at the University of Pennylvania, James A. Sauer, who has led an archeological project in the area of ancient Sheba for the past five years, argues that Sheba is older than some scholars have thought.

Sauer`s hypothesis, stated in a recent paper on the project, is based partly on an excavation in a dry valley called Wadi al-Jubah, about 25 miles south of the remains of Sheba`s capital at Marib, in the eastern region of present-day Yemen.

The cut was made in a mound called Hajar at-Tamrah, the Mound of the Date Palm, and near its bottom archeologists found broken pottery and a piece of timber that radiocarbon tests indicated was from the 13th century B.C. In such tests, traces of carbon 14, a natural radioactive isotope of carbon, are used to determine the age of fossil and archeological remains.

At a larger mound, Hajar ar-Rayhani, American excavators have turned up pottery, ash and evidence of a copper foundry dating to the seventh century B.C., and the diggers still have several yards and several centuries to go before they reach the oldest layers of the mound.

Although such findings are still just hints, Sauer thinks further excavations will eventually provide evidence for those scholars who have assumed Sheba was a considerable trading nation by the time of Solomon, and was thus capable of sending a monarch to pay a call on another rich monarch 1,400 miles to the north.

``These findings are very preliminary,`` Sauer said recently. ``But they fit in with recent excavations in Saudi Arabia, where some very early finds have also turned up, also older than the 10th century B.C., and I think they demolish the idea that south Arabian civilization is too young to have sent a queen to Jerusalem.``

QUESTIONS OF CHRONOLOGY

Although archeological excavations since the 1920s have convinced some specialists that southern Arabian civilization dates to the 10th or 11th century B.C., part of the evidence for this chronology comes from excavations in what is now the country of Southern Yemen rather than from the area around Marib, Sheba`s capital.

In Sheba, a great stone dam near Marib, an elegant temple to the local moon god, bronze and albaster statues and other signs of wealth and civilization are all considerably younger than Solomon`s time.

One other factor that has cast doubt on the idea that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba actually met has been the argument by the Belgian scholar Jacqueline Pirenne that the many inscriptions from the ancient kingdoms of southern Arabia were based on the Greek alphabet, and that the area`s high civilization, heavily influenced by the Greeks, probably dated no further than about the fifth century B.C.

This thesis, which has been advanced since the mid-1950s, has been rejected by most American linguists and archeologists. The Americans say the alphabets of southern Arabia derived not from the Greek alphabet but from northern Semitic alphabets such as the Phonecian, from which the Greek alphabet was also derived.

From Washington, Gus W. Van Beek, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said Sauer`s project in Wadi al-Jubah was potentially important. Van Beek also believes in the plausibility of a Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, although her visit would have been for trade and economic reasons rather than to test Solomon`s wisdom.

Van Beek cautioned, however, that carbon 14 dates could be misleading and that further samples needed to be taken. Van Beek`s own archeological research in southern Arabia makes him think that high civilization in the area dates to perhaps the 10th or 11th century B.C., when it was imported from the Tigris- Euphrates Valley and the eastern Mediterranean coast, but not as far back as the 13th century.